Brad Warthen's Blog

This is worse than Facebook

You know how I've complained about how I just don't get Facebook -- that I find it disorienting, and just generally a lousy way to communicate information?

Well, I've found a worse way -- Twitter.

Have you seen this new site that S.C. Rep. Dan Hamilton and self-described GOP "political operative" Wesley Donehue have started, SCTweets? Basically, its point is:

...to find a creative way to showcase SC’s tech-savvy elected officials. Specifically, we expect the Statehouse crew to be twittering a lot from the floor and we thought it would be cool to see what they were saying. That goal somehow expanded and we decided to showcase all South Carolina politicos with our directory. We then gave them a way to interact through #sctweets.

Look, I don't mean to criticize Messrs. Hamilton and Donehue at all. I appreciate the effort. Go for it. But when I try to obtain any sort of information of value from a series of incomplete, typo-ridden sentence fragments from a bunch of people ranging from Anton Gunn to David Thomas to Bob Inglis to Nathan Ballentine to Thad Viers, with a lot of Blogosphere usual suspects such as Mattheus Mei thrown in, I feel like I've trying to get nutrition from a bowl of Lucky Charms mixed with Cracker Jack with cotton candy and Pop Rocks on top, stirred with a Slim Jim. Just a jumble of junk.

The "authors" aren't to blame. It's the medium. I'm still waiting to find any value in this Twitter thing. I suspect I'll be waiting a long time.

What do I consider to be GOOD way to communicate information? Well, here's a coincidence: I actually looked at my Facebook page this morning, and as usual got little out of it. But I noticed where a friend I worked with a quarter-century ago posted something that seemed a deliberate illustration of the incoherence of Facebook. He exhorted readers to:

* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note to your wall.

So I followed his instructions (except for the posting part). The book nearest to my laptop was the literally dog-eared (chewed by a dog that died three decades ago) paperback Byline: Ernest Hemingway. Here's the fifth sentence on page 56 (if you count the incomplete, continued sentence at the top of the page as the first):

"He smiled like a school girl, shrugged his shoulders and raised his hands to his face in a mock gesture of shame."

And you know what? I got more out of that than I got out of that Twitter page. At least I formed a clear, coherent picture of something.

It occurs to me that Twitter is the bright new world that that Colorado congressman who claims credit for killing The Rocky Mountain News extols. And then it occurs to me that to the extent he is right, to the extent that this is the future of political communication, we are in a lot of trouble int his country...

The unspeakable horror

This was a terrible day for news about children.

The awful thing is that the front-page story about the boy shot and killed by his brother while they were idle on a "snow" day was not the worst, most appallingly horrific such news in the paper.

It was awful enough. In my long career in this business, I am often shocked at how unbelievably trivial the incidents leading to domestic homicides (the most common kind) can be. Although I can't remember whether this happened in Tennessee or Kansas or South Carolina (the three places I've worked), the archetype in my mind was a case in which two grown men who were related to each other (I want to say an uncle and his nephew) were drinking heavily, and one shot the other after the quarreled over what to watch on TV.

This case exceeds that one in sheer awfulness, and not only because it was children involved. These boys were arguing over who would sit where while they watched TV. The mind reels, this is so terribly sad and unnecessary.

And those words -- "terribly sad and unnecessary" -- are so pathetically inadequate. You have to be a better writer than I am to describe it adequately, and I mean a MUCH better writer. Conrad got at it with Kurtz' raw whisper, "The horror! The horror!" Obviously, you don't have to travel to deepest Africa to find the Heart of Darkness.

Then there's Dostoevsky, of whom I was reminded in reading the second, and even worse, item in today's paper. Ivan Karamazov, world-class cynic, told his idealistic brother, "You see, I am fond of collecting certain facts, and, would you believe, I even copy anecdotes of a certain sort from newspapers and books, and I've already got a fine collection." They tended to be of horrific incidents of unspeakably terrible things being done to children, and they confirmed him in his dim view of humanity.

This second story would have fit perfectly in his collection. Before I share it let me warn you that this is by far the most horrible, shocking, painful-to-read thing I have ever posted on this blog.

That said, here it is:

SUMTER, S.C. -- The parents of five South Carolina children have been charged after their 1-year-old boy starved to death in a Sumter home crawling with rats and roaches, authorities said Tuesday.
    The toddler, who has not been named, was found unresponsive Monday at a home that Sumter County Coroner Harvin Bullock described as filthy and unsuitable for living.
    The child was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead, Sumter Police Chief Patty Patterson said.
    A police report listed the toddler's weight as 4 pounds.
    The boy's parents have been arrested and charged with homicide by child abuse and unlawful conduct. Kevin Dewayne Isaac, 25, and Marketta Sharnise McCray, 23, were in jail Tuesday awaiting a bond hearing, and it was not immediately clear if they had attorneys, police said.
    If convicted on the homicide by child abuse charge, Isaac and McCray could face life in prison, and Patterson said more charges could be forthcoming.
    The boy's twin sister, whose weight was listed as 9 pounds, has been hospitalized for malnutrition, and three other children in the home have been placed in state custody.
    Those children - ages 4, 6, and 9 - are being checked out by physicians, Patterson said.

As I read that in the paper this morning, it struck me as so massively tragic that the pages of a newspaper seemed far too frail and insubstantial to support it. The item -- which is about a child who was a twin, and almost exactly the same age as my precious twin grandchildren -- should have dropped through the page, through my breakfast table, and plunged straight into the netherworld before I could see it. Yet there it was.

Ironically, today was the same day that The New York Times editorialized, again, to this effect:

We were horrified to be reminded that the nation still has not plumbed the depths of the Bush administration’s abuses....

Remember when I wrote about that several months ago, about how easy it was to inspire "horror" in the eyes of the NYT editorial board? I even wrote a follow-up to provide a little perspective on things we should truly "watch with horror." I even included some pictures that were very painful to look at.

But you know what? This news about this poor child starved to death is harder to take than what I cited before. You see something like this, and you want to be distracted from it. You say, by all means let's talk instead about how filled with horror we are at that awful George W. Bush and the unspeakable things he did. Let's indict him. After all, the NYT accuses him of "mangling the Constitution." Let's have show trials, 24/7 on television. I promise to shout and wave a pitchfork. Anything to avoid thinking about that little item I read in the paper this morning.

Because I don't want to think about that any more.

Remembering 'Breaking the News'

Back in the first comment on this post, Lee mentioned James Fallows' excellent book, Breaking the News: The News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy -- which, as it happens, I actually reviewed for this newspaper when it came out.

Here's what I wrote, back in 1996:

THE STATE
MEDIA EXAMINES ITSELF<
Published on: 02/25/1996
Section: TEMPO
Edition: FINAL
Page: F6
Reviewed by Brad Warthen
Memo: Brad Warthen is an associate editor of The State's editorial page.


BREAKING THE NEWS: How the Media Undermine American Democracy

By James Fallows
Pantheon, 296 pages, $23

    So you think the news media are dragging the country down with their negativity and their failure to put things in perspective?
    So join the club. A lot of us on the inside of this alleged profession agree. James Fallows, Washington editor of The Atlantic Monthly, is one. Fallows' saving grace is that he's written this book explaining exactly what is wrong and why it matters.
    The problem has to do with perverse cognitive habits that journalists embrace as normal, but which cause them to portray public life in ways that make it hard for readers and viewers to engage it constructively.
    For instance: ``Step by step, mainstream journalism has fallen into the habit of portraying public life as a race to the bottom, in which one group of conniving, insincere politicians ceaselessly tries to outmaneuver another.'' Among journalists, casting a jaded eye upon anything a politician does is seen as being ``professional.'' We tend to think of it as healthy skepticism. But there is nothing healthy about it.
    In fact, ``By choosing to present public life as a contest among scheming political leaders, all of whom the public should view with suspicion, the news media helps bring about that very result.''
    That's exactly what has happened. As a groundbreaking poll discovered last year, the public is now far more cynical about politics and government than are journalists, who are more likely to believe that our political system is sound, and that citizens can make a difference. In other words, the people believe the system is just as bad as we've painted it, and we know better.
    There are excellent examples in this book illustrating the profound disconnect between journalists and sensible people.
    One of the best-documented is the journalists' penchant for reducing everything -- every issue, every speech, every policy initiative, every human gesture by a politician -- to what it means in terms of the next election. If a politician tries to do something about starving children, we immediately wonder aloud what this means in terms of the way he's trying to position himself in New Hampshire.
    If Fallows didn't do anything else in this book, I would praise him to the skies for drawing so clearly the connection between the way we cover politics and the way we cover sports -- which is to say, in virtually the same manner. Journalists tend to see everything as a contest, which one side must win and the other must lose. This, of course, leaves no room for the kind of consensus-building that solves problems in the real world.
    Politics and government matter, but modern journalism has done much to cause the public to despair of it ever meaning anything good.
    The sins that Fallows details in this book are examined in a manner that shows clearly ``how they affect the future prospects of every American by distorting the processes by which we choose our leaders and resolve our public problems.''
    Unlike most modern journalism, this book does not merely wallow in unrelieved despair. The author writes encouragingly of such things as the ``public journalism'' movement, through which a number of far-sighted, community-oriented journalists (you'll note that few of them are in Washington or New York) have started accepting responsibility for fixing the problem, starting with themselves.
    Fallows draws an interesting connection between the way the U.S. military examined and healed itself after Vietnam, and the way journalists can become their own best physicians. It won't be easy, but it can be done -- we just have to unlearn about half of the nonsense that got crammed into our heads in journalism school.
    Fallows has correctly diagnosed what's wrong with American journalism. If you want to know why you ought to be mad at the media, read this book. If everybody would read it (journalists should read it twice), we might find ourselves on the way to a cure.

The awful irony is that this was just when things were starting to get much worse, what with 24/7 shouting heads on cable TV and the blogosphere yet to come. The pointless, yammering, conflict for its own sake is SO much worse now -- and it's one of the things I struggle with constantly here on the blog, along with those of you who still hope for a civil town square in which to discuss issues -- that when I look back on when that review was written, it's almost like a lost age of innocence....

Well, that's a big releef

At 11:02 a.m. today, I received a release from Jim Clyburn's office with the following headline on it:

CLYBURN CALLS JINDAL’S BLUFF, HIGHLIGHTS HYPOCRACY

Then, at 11:33, I got the corrected version, which makes me feel so much better:

CLYBURN CALLS JINDAL’S BLUFF, HIGHLIGHTS HYPOCRICY

Still awaiting the next correction; I'll let you know when I see it...

Reaganism, boiled down to its essence

Being a word guy, I got a kick out of this first paragraph of a letter we ran on our Sunday page:

Government is the problem. Stop it.

Although those two sentences actually make more sense, something about them reminded me of Stephen Colbert's "I Am America (And So Can You!)"

The temptation was strong to edit the letter so that it stopped there. It would have been perfect, a statement of Reaganism boiled down to its minimalist essence. If Reagan were the coal, this would be the diamond.

But I left the letter alone. Here it is:

Government printing too much money

Government is the problem. Stop it.

It is printing unprecedented amounts of money. Continuing will lead to hyper-inflation. Remember the Weimer Republic hyper-inflation, when a wheelbarrow full of money was needed for a loaf of bread?

It's simple supply and demand. When the government effectively prints so many dollars, the value of the dollar will eventually go down, drastically.

For now, call all members of Congress and urge them to kill the “stimulus” (incredible pork-barrel, not stimulus) bill.

In the longer form, however, the message lacked purity. It gave you things to argue with; you could say, "Hmmm. I seem to recall the Weimar Republic had certain other problems that contributed to the devaluation of the currency, something more than the act itself of printing too much money." Nevertheless, I do love a good historical analogy. My favorite with regard to Weimar inflation is this: The night of the Beer Hall Putsch, until it was time to make their move, one of Hitler's aides bought three beers so the two of them and one other follower could blend in. The beers cost three billion marks. But you know, if I wanted to talk about runaway inflation, I'd probably cite something more immediate: Zimbabwe has to print new denominations every week, because prices double every day. (Then again, though, Zimbabwe has bigger problems that contribute to having to print the money, not vice versa.)

But that first paragraph was very enjoyable, esthetically speaking. It was like haiku or something...

I didn't get a harrumph out of that guy...

Being an editor is often a thankless job, but you get these little rewards now and then. Such as this one, which probably wouldn't mean anything to anyone who doesn't love words as much as I do, but was a nice treat for me...

One of my colleagues had used "harrumphed" in an editorial I was editing, and I decided that I would check the spelling, on the off chance that it was actually in the Webster's New World College Dictionary, which is the one we use as an official arbiter in our style rules.

And it was! Which I thought was way cool. Also, I believe it's correct to call it an onomatopoeia, which doubles the fun, since that's a fun word to say.

Finally, it allowed me to use my favorite line from "Blazing Saddles" as a blog headline.

And who says editors don't have fun?

Moby Dick is a squitchy good read (Surprise!)

Doug Ross mentioning The Canterbury Tales back on this post -- which I never read (somehow, I escaped its being required of me in school) -- reminds me of something I'm reading at the moment and sort of enjoying, much to my surprise:

Moby Dick.

For years -- for decades in fact; almost four of them -- I refused to read Moby Dick on principle. You see, we spent like six weeks on it in my honors English class in the 11th grade at Robinson High School in Tampa, and I never did read it, at least not past "Call me Ishmael." And yet I got an A-plus on the six weeks test on the book. How? First, because it was an essay test -- which always gave me a leg up in school. Multiple choice can be such a brutally effective means of telling whether you actually know the material. With an essay, you can be careful to stick to what you know you know, and steer clear of your blank spots. And some, but not all, teachers are dazzled by a nicely worded essay. Although not all teachers -- I had one prof in college who wrote on one of my better B.S. efforts something like, "Nicely written; I enjoyed it. But obviously you are not familiar with the material." Enough teachers were snowed for me to get by, though. And I confess this played a not inconsiderable part in my decision to write for a living.

Also -- and this is the bigger point -- how on Earth could I possibly not be familiar with all the themes, characters and plot after six weeks of listening to people talk and talk and talk about it in class, even if I was only half-listening, which was probably the case?

Anyway, I took such perverse pride in that grade -- one of my most dramatic coups of skating without having done the work in my educational career -- that I avoided reading the book subsequently because I didn't want to spoil the perfection of my slacker record. I had read -- and enjoyed -- other books years after I was supposed to have read them in school. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for instance. But I kept myself pure on Melville.

But I picked up a copy recently, tempted by the fact that I'm such a huge fan of Patrick O'Brian's seafaring tales and thinking I might actually enjoy this one, although not having high expectations.

And you know what? While I doubt it will ever be my favorite novel, I've been really surprised by how accessible it is. I mean, I always had the impression (based on the way the people who actually read it in school groaned about the experience) that it was just something that no one in our era could possibly relate to, that it was way too 19th century for that (and not in a fun way, like Mark Twain). But on the contrary, I'm struck by how modern its tone and style is in parts. Also, it's very bite-sized -- the chapters are no longer than a typical newspaper column, and each one a well-crafted nugget all by its lonesome. So you can read a chapter, think "That wasn't so bad," then read another, and really feel like you're making progress without a lot of time invested all at once. (Try that with Dostoevsky, someone I actually did read and enjoy when I was supposed to in college, but not a guy you'd describe as "accessible" in the sense that I mean here.)

Far from being some boring old guy telling us stuff in boring old language, Ishmael as a narrator is actually sort of hiply ironic. He has a detachment and amusement toward his heavy subject material that is very late-20th century. And sometimes, the language itself goes along with the tone. For instance, in this passage very early in the book, describing a painting he puzzled over at The Spouter Inn:

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.--It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.--It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.--It's a blasted heath.--It's a Hyperborean winter scene.--It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture's midst. THAT once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?

Who'd have thought Melville could have written such a line as "A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted?" That is a very New Journalism use of language; one could imagine Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson being responsible for it. Or, to speak in fiction terms, it can be almost as modern-feeling as Nick Hornby or Roddy Doyle. It strikes me that way, anyway. Way more modern-seeming than much-later writers such as James Joyce or Fitzgerald or even Hemingway (who sounded WAY modern in the 20s, I suppose, but not so much later on).

As I read on, Ishmael is not what I'd call a likable character -- he's too much of a wise guy for that, tossing out ironic comments about everyone and everything. But he's certainly accessible.

And that surprised me.

Why is it so hard to say 'abortion?'

There's nothing unusual about this, but about the thousandth time this morning, in reading an editorial from the weekend in The New York Times, I marveled at how long it took to get past all the pro-choice euphemisms ("women's health," "reproductive health and freedom," "safeguard women's lives," "free speech") and get to the one operative word upon which the issue turns:

Women’s Health, Ungagged
    President Obama on Friday began dismantling his predecessor’s broad and damaging assault on women’s reproductive health and freedom. He lifted the odious gag rule that President George W. Bush imposed on international family planning groups and began trying to restore financing to the United Nations Population Fund.
    It was a reassuring message that Mr. Obama takes seriously his duty to safeguard women’s lives and basic rights, including free speech and the choice of whether to bear a child.
    The gag rule was first imposed by President Ronald Reagan. It barred any health care provider receiving American family planning assistance from counseling women on abortion, engaging in political speech on abortion or providing abortions, even with its own money...

By my count (actually, by Microsoft Word's count -- what, you think I've got time to sit and count them?), it took 113 words to get to "abortion." Which actually isn't all that bad, I guess, compared to some instances I've seen. But it strikes me as about 100 words, or two paragraphs, late, by any reasonable standard of getting to the point.

But then, I'm a word guy -- and specifically, an editorial guy -- so I probably notice stuff like that more than most people do. Also, I disagree with the NYT on the issue, so I'm that much more likely to notice how much they feel compelled to dress up the concept, with layer upon layer of rhetorical clothing, before bringing it out.

Accidents WILL happen

Don't take that headline as me brushing off the seriousness of the problem. Just take it as an opportunity to quote Elvis Costello.

We'll have a correction on tomorrow's editorial page for the second day in a row. I can't remember the last time that happened.

When I first came to editorial in 1994, I thought it a bit much that ALL editors in the department read proofs every day. It didn't seem efficient. By the time I became editor in '97, I had come to value the process for two reasons: It kept everyone plugged in and gave them ownership of what was on the pages (the great danger in newspaper work, since so many things happen at once, is to be so caught up in what you're doing that you miss the overall picture). And it made the editorial pages the cleanest in the paper.

The value of it is underlined in circumstances such as this, when one person is both doing the initial pre-production edit of the copy, and is then the only one reading proofs. The error in Sunday's editorial (corrected on today's page) is sufficiently complicated and esoteric that I can't say I would have caught it myself even if fully staffed, although the initial writing error -- the conflation of two projects in the town of Lexington; one public, the other private -- is almost certainly the product of the writer working at quadruple pace to crank out editorials to leave behind.

But today's error simply would not have happened if -- as was the case not too long ago -- there were five senior editors reading proofs. Instead of just me, and I'm the same one who read it on the front end.

Yes, thank you -- I know Harvey Peeler introduced the roll-call-voting proposal, not his brother Bob. I know Bob's not in the Senate. I know both guys, and know the difference between them. Got it. Nobody else needs to call to inform me. (Someone just came into my office to tell me while I was typing this.) Thanks. The correction will be in the paper tomorrow.

Now can I get back to doing my best to put out the rest of these pages without errors?

(And oh, yeah -- I still feel like total crud, Ferris. I've got a call in to my doctor to see if he'll call in an antibiotic. My chest hurts from the congestion. Oh, didn't I mention that? Yeah, the stomach crud became respiratory crud over the weekend. Still running low fever each night, coughing all day. Taking all sorts of drugs for the symptoms -- Oh, look, it's time to take them again -- yippee!)

'Hyperbole' and Iraq

The last couple of days I've broken my rule about not responding substantially to e-mails. In the interests of making the best use of my time for the readers' benefit, I try to steer people to the blog so that everybody can join in on the conversation. Anyway, when I break my rule I try to do this, which is publish the exchange on the blog. This exchange started, of course, with my Sunday column:

From: Pat Mohr
Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2008 4:34 PM
To: Warthen, Brad - External Email
Subject: hyperbole

Well, Mr. Warthen, isn't your respect for the language, as the SNL church lady would say, "special?"  I guess I'm just another bleeding-heart liberal because I did watch in horror as my country approved torture and suspended habeus corpus for prisoners. And I did watch in horror as people died after Katrina because we had incompetent ideologues in the White House who sat and watched that devastation because  they wanted to "reduce the size of government to the point that they could drown it in the bathtub."  And I've watched in horror as we waged a "war" (otherwise known as an occupation) in which thousands and Americans and even more thousands of Iraqis died because we made a mistake about Saddam's intentions.

Now if those things don't fill you with horror, you're not the man I hoped you were.

Sincerely,
Pat Mohr

On Dec 2, 2008, at 1:54 PM, Warthen, Brad - Internal Email wrote:

The NYT editorial in question wasn't about the issues you mentioned. That was one of the bizarre things about it. It was about things like unauthorized wiretaps, and the operation of Gitmo. Hardly "horror" stuff.

I know lots of people look upon our involvement in Iraq with "horror." I don't, but I know other people do. The NYT editorial wasn't about anything like that.

You want to see what I look upon, with horror, read my blog. http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/2008/12/some-things-tha.html

From: Pat Mohr
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 2:24 PM
To: Warthen, Brad - Internal Email
Subject: Re: hyperbole
Importance: High

Thank you for responding. I understand what you're saying about the other issues in the NYT editorial, but I do believe that Gitmo is a horror because of the torture that has been sanctioned there (and in other places because of rendition). If this torture was indeed not just the work of some bad apples, and we have some evidence to say that it wasn't, then it does qualify as a horror.  Like many other Americans, i never thought I'd live to see the day that my country sanctioned torture---not for ANY reason!

And I will go look at your blog.  One reason is that I'd like to know why you don't look upon Iraq as a horror. I don't attribute intent, but I do believe that our government mistakenly believed the boasts of Saddam and ignored/demeaned reports that did not support their preconceptions. Then we refused to wait for the inspectors to go back & look further for WMDs or to go through the UN for assistance, coming up instead with our "coalition of the willing".  Meanwhile, Bush and Cheney deliberately conflated 9/11 with Iraq to justify our preemptive invasion. I still see polls that report that something like 40% of evangelicals believe that Iraqis attacked us on 9/11. So I'll look to see why you don't believe that the ensuing deaths of thousands was not indeed horrible....

I always read your column because even though I frequently disagree with you, you're rational and provide reasons for your opinions. This is no small thing in an area of the country infested with ideologues!  I'll always appreciate the work you do!

On Dec 2, 2008, at 3:14 PM, Warthen, Brad - Internal Email wrote:

Thanks for the kind words.

I doubt that I can explain my support for our invasion of Iraq in 2003 to your satisfaction. I can't explain it to my wife's satisfaction. I certainly can't explain it to the satisfaction of people who disagree on my blog.

It has nothing to do with WMD. I realize it did for an awful lot of people, but not for me. So while I saw not finding the WMD (which we all know had been there, because Saddam had used it) as a big setback, it didn't change anything about why I saw us needing to go in there.

It did have a great deal to do with 9/11, but not in some simplistic way such as you describe, the "hitting back at the people who attacked us" formula. I don't think in those terms.

Either you look at the situation we had in the world at that time and agree with me, or you don't. It's very hard to bridge the gap. I looked at a lot of things, and that's what it added up to for me. Other people look at the same things and don't arrive there at all. Part of it is that I am by nature inclined to intervention. I think we were right to intervene in the Balkans, and wrong not to in Rwanda and Darfur. I think we were wrong to leave Somalia in 2003. I believe when you're the most powerful nation in the world -- economically, militarily, just about any other way -- you have an obligation to act when people are suffering and being oppressed. Anti-war people think that's arrogant. I think it's cold NOT to want to do what we can. And the fact is, if we want to, we can do a great deal.

Here are two of those reasons, which make all the sense in the world to me, but not to antiwar people:
-- Until 9/11, the U.S. policy toward the region had been maintaining the status quo. What that had meant was backing current regimes, however horrible -- or at least leaving them alone -- so as to keep the oil flowing. Don't rock the boat. The 1991 Gulf War was a perfect example of this old strategy: Saddam had attacked Kuwait and was threatening the much bigger target of Saudi Arabia. We sent an overwhelming force to preserve the status quo ante -- pushing Saddam back "where he belonged," and restoring the previous government in Kuwait, and protecting the Saudi regime. We didn't want to take Baghdad then because that might have created a vacuum into which Iran, and to a lesser extent Syria and Turkey, might flow. That would upset the apple cart, and we didn't want to do that. (We should have, because at that time we had something we didn't have 12 years later -- overwhelming force, enough to occupy and stabilize Iraq. I understand why we didn't -- but that calculation was based on the old, pre-9/11, policy of preserving the status quo.)
     9/11 changed this equation, because it showed us that preserving the status quo -- one in which oppressive regimes produced political frustration and encouraged Islamic militantism -- was extraordinarily dangerous to us. The 9/11 hijackers were the result of the old policy of supporting the status quo. We needed to begin the process of changing the region, and Iraq was a good place to start. Succeed there (and the problem in Iraq is that so many things were done wrong in the first years that it took far too long to succeed), and you encourage liberalizing, democratizing forces in all middle eastern countries. We saw the beginnings of that in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Libya -- although much of it was set back by the increasing violence that was only quelled after the Surge began at the start of 2007. Much of that good effect has yet to be seen, but that doesn't mean it can't still happen.

-- Iraq was the place to start because we had every reason to go in and take out the regime there. Saddam had violated terms of the 1991 cease fire for 12 years. He was shooting at our planes enforcing the no-fly zone. In 2002, the UN passed the resolution authorizing force unless Saddam met certain conditions -- which he failed to meet. Some significant UN members balked at acting upon the resolution -- France, Germany, Russia -- but plenty of others, including most European powers, actually joined that "coalition of the willing." And why not? Saddam had spent the last decade and more cementing his reputation as an outlaw regime.

Anyway, that's PART of my thinking on the subject. It doesn't make sense to people who agree. It DOES make sense to some who do, such as the New York Times' Tom Friedman.

Hope that helps, but I won't be surprised if it doesn't.

From: Pat Mohr
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 8:27 PM
To: Warthen, Brad - Internal Email
Subject: Re: hyperbole
Importance: High

Hmm, I've gone back and read and re-read your rationales for going into Iraq. I'm still thinking---because you've made some good points. I do have to tell you, though, that I'm not anti-war; I just think it should be restricted to defense. However, many of your reasons seem to indicate that you truly believe that you are your brothers' keeper, and that's morality I share. I too think we should have gone into Darfur and Rwanda. We do have an obligation to help the oppressed---but not only the oppressed with oil under their land. I just don't think that Iraq should have been singled out, even in the mideast.  What about the outrageous treatment of women in Saudi Arabia for example? And how can we be the world's policemen? How can we ever fix it all?

Moreover, I think our presumptuous invasion has brought us so much international ill will that it will be years before our reputation is restored. And then there's the billions and billions of dollars that have been squandered in this war.  I wonder if Iraqis think it was worth it because I don't think most Americans do. And now we're in greater jeopardy in Afghanistan---and we still haven't found Osama.

All that said, in the light of your comments, I intend to start reading your blog as I continue to think about my position.  I like to think that I'm open-minded enough to change my mind given additional evidence.  I wish I could come back in fifty years and see what verdict history renders on this war....

Thank you again for engaging in this dialogue with me.

On Dec 3, 2008, at 10:54 AM, Warthen, Brad - Internal Email wrote:

All I can ask for is to get people to think about the points I make, so I thank you for that.

In answer to one point you made, let me point out that we did not have an acceptable rationale for invading Saudi Arabia. Remember the 12 years of defiance of the ceasefire agreement, and all those UN resolutions that gave us authorization to go into Iraq. We had nothing like that in the case of Saudi Arabia, or Iran or anyone else. Just Iraq.

Also, the reference to oil is a non-sequitur. We kicked Saddam out of Kuwait for oil. The policy of supporting the status quo was about oil. Invading Iraq actually endangered the flow of oil by upsetting the status quo.

You might be interested in a column I wrote before the Iraq invasion, about why we needed to go in:

THE STATE
THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH ABOUT WHY WE MAY HAVE TO INVADE IRAQ
Published on: 02/02/2003
Section: EDITORIAL
Edition: FINAL
Page: D2
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor

AMERICA SEES ITSELF, quite admirably, as a nation that doesn't go around starting fights, but is perfectly willing and able to end them once they start.

Because of that, President Bush has a tall hill to climb when it comes to persuading the American people that, after 10 years of keeping Saddam Hussein in his box, we should now go in after him, guns blazing.

In his State of the Union address, the president gave some pretty good reasons why we need to act in Iraq, but were they good enough? I don't know. Probably not. It's likely that no one outside of the choir loft was converted by his preaching on the subject. And that's a problem. Overall, while there have been moments over the last 16 months when he has set out the situation with remarkable clarity, those times have been too few and far between.

He has my sympathy on this count, though: His efforts have been hampered by the fact that the main reason we may need to invade Iraq is one that the president can't state too clearly without creating more problems internationally than it would solve. At the same time, it's a reason that seems so obvious that he shouldn't have to state it. We should all be able to figure it out.

And yet, it seems, we don't.

I hear people asking why, after all this time, we want to go after Saddam now. He was always a tyrant, so what's changed? North Korea is probably closer to a nuclear bomb than he is, they say, so why not go after Kim Jong Il first?

We left him in power a decade ago, they ask, so why the change?

The answer to all of the above is: Sept. 11.

Before that, U.S. policy-makers didn't want to destabilize the status quo in the Mideast. What we learned on Sept. 11 is that the status quo in the region is unacceptable. It must change.

Change has to start somewhere, and Iraq is the best place to insert the lever, for several reasons - geography, culture, demographics, but most of all because Saddam Hussein has given us all the justification we need to go in and take him out: We stopped shooting in 1991 because he agreed to certain terms, and he has repeatedly thumbed his nose at those agreements.

Iraq may not be the best place in the world to try to nurture a liberal democracy, but it's the best shot we have in the Mideast.

I'm far from the only one saying this. The New York Times' Tom Friedman, who has more knowledge of the region in his mustache than I'll ever have, has said it a number of times, most recently just last week:

"What threatens Western societies today are not the deterrables, like Saddam, but the undeterrables - the boys who did 9/11, who hate us more than they love life. It's these human missiles of mass destruction that could really destroy our open society. . . . If we don't help transform these Arab states - which are also experiencing population explosions - to create better governance, to build more open and productive economies, to empower their women and to develop responsible news media that won't blame all their ills on others, we will never begin to see the political, educational and religious reformations they need to shrink their output of undeterrables."

Journalists can say these things, and some do. But if the president does, the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Syrians and just about everybody else in the region will go nuts. In European capitals, and even in certain circles here at home, he will be denounced as the worst sort of imperialist. Osama bin Laden's followers will seize upon such words as proof that the West has embarked upon another Crusade - not for Christ this time, but for secular Western culture.

None of which changes the fact that the current state of affairs in Arab countries and Iran is a deadly threat to the United States. So we have to do something about it. We've seen what doing nothing gets us - Sept. 11. Action is very risky. But we've reached the point at which inaction is at least as dangerous.

Should we go in as conquerors, lord it over the people of Iraq and force them to be like us? Absolutely not. It wouldn't work, anyway. We have to create conditions under which Iraqis - all Iraqis, including women - can choose their own course. We did that in Germany and Japan, and it worked wonderfully (not that Iraq is Germany or Japan, but those are the examples at hand). And no one can say the Germans are under the American thumb.

But that brings us to a problem. The recalcitrance of the Germans, the French and others undermines the international coalition that would be necessary to nation-building in Iraq. It causes another problem as well:

Maybe we could accomplish our goal without invading Iraq - which of course would be preferable. By merely threatening to do so, we could embolden elements within the country to overthrow him, which might provide us with certain opportunities.

But the irony is that people aren't going to rise up against Saddam as long as Europeans and so many people in this country fail to support the president's goal of going after him. As long as they see all this dissension, they'll likely believe (rightly) that Saddam might just hang on yet again.

If the United Nations, or at least the West, presented a united front, the possibility of Saddam collapsing without our firing a shot would be much greater. But for some reason, too many folks in Europe and in this country don't see that. Or just don't want to.

Maybe somebody should point it out to them.

Write to Mr. Warthen at P.O. Box 1333, Columbia, S.C. 29202, or [email protected].

By the way, do you mind if I post our exchange on my blog? Whenever I spend this much time writing about a subject, I try to share it with as wide an audience as possible...

From: Pat Mohr
Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2008 11:06 AM
To: Warthen, Brad - Internal Email
Subject: Re: hyperbole
Importance: High


Certainly, you may share it.

That's it. Join in, if you got this far...